MPlayer

Kyle Rankin

Author of Linux Multimedia Hacks,
Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference,
and Ubuntu Hacks

http://www.greenfly.org/talks/multimedia/mplayer.html

Agenda

• What is mplayer
• Seriously, a command-line video program?
• Basic usage
• Hardware acceleration
• Restricted formats
• Phantom edits
• Auto-crop
• Flip and rotate
• Subtitles
• Fun with ASCII

What is mplayer

• MPlayer: (http://mplayerhq.hu)
• The swiss army knife of multimedia players
• With the right codecs, can play just about anything:
• Audio: mp3s, oggs, wavs, wma, streams
• Video: avis, movs, mpg, xvid, streams
• Packaged for most major distributions
• Plugins available for Linux web browsers
• Command-line based

Seriously, a command-line video program?

• Hey there are alternatives...
• Totem, xine, VLC, ...
• No alternatives are as featureful
• MPlayer can play some freakish video/audio combinations
• One exception: MPlayer can't navigate DVD menus
• If nothing else, a good fallback for multimedia
• A gui (gmplayer) does exist...
• But the alternatives are IMO, better

Basic usage

• Usage:
• mplayer filename
• mplayer dvd://1
• mplayer dvd://1 -dvd-device filename.iso
• mplayer http://site.com/stream.mov
• Keybindings:
• left/right: seek backward/forward 10 secs
• p,space: Pause
• f: Fullscreen
• +/-: Adjust audio delay by +/- 0.1 seconds
• 9/0: Decrease/increase volume
• Many more (see manpage)

Hardware acceleration

• For best results, use hardware acceleration. Why?
• Less work for the CPU = better performance for high-res video
• Automatic video scaling (for fullscreen)
• Xvideo (-vo xv) default if supported
• X11 (-vo x11) default software renderer
• DGA (-vo dga) writes to framebuffer, but always fullscreen
• SVGAlib (-vo svga) displays from console
• Framebuffer (-vo fbdev) console, uses kernel framebuffer
• VESA (-vo vesa) console, just needs VESA-compatible BIOS

Restricted formats

• Booooo! Hiss!
• .movs, .wmv, DVD, many others
• Restricted formats can work in Linux
• Typically wrap around Windows codecs "w32codecs"
• DVDs need libdvdcss
• But distros can't ship the codecs by default
• Distros: So... my friend knows this guy...
• All else fails, get the w32codec pack from mplayerhq.hu

Phantom edits

• MPlayer feature called Edit Decision Lists (EDL)
• Allows you to script skipping within a movie
• Steps:
• mplayer -edlfile sample-edl.txt sample.avi
• hit i to set edit placeholder
• edit the EDL file to adjust timings and change actions
• Actions either 0 (skip scene) or 1 (mute scene)
• To play: mplayer -edl sample-edl.txt sample.avi

Auto-crop

• Some video files (VCDs, SVCDs) have black bars along top and bottom
• If you have a widescreen display, you probably want to crop them
• First: mplayer -vf cropdetect movie.mpg
• Grab crop info from output:
• crop area: X: 0..479 Y:80..496 (-vf crop=480:416:0:80) 2.5% 3 0 46%
• Then: mplayer -vf crop=480:416:0:80 movie.mpg

Flip and rotate

• Flip and rotate video in increments of 90 degrees
• -vf rotate (clockwise and flip)
• rotate=1 90 degrees clockwise
• rotate=2 90 degrees counterclockwise
• rotate=3 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip
• -vf flip, and -vf mirror (reverse projection!)

Subtitles

Add custom subtitles to any movie, create textfile and use:
mplayer -sub subtitlefile video

TITLE=Spiderman 3 Trailer
TYPE=VIDEO
FORMAT=TIME
6 4
Spider-man, Spider-man
0 4
Does whatever a spider can

Fun with ASCII

• AAlib converts video frames into ASCII art
• Instal aalib on system, then use mplayer -vo aa video.avi
• Black and white :(
• Caca saves the day!
• libcaca like aalib, only colorized
• mplayer -vo caca video.avi

Questions?

More Resources

• http://mplayerhq.hu
• MPlayer manpage (huge)
• Shameless Plug: Linux Multimedia Hacks